Monthly Archives: April 2015

Post navigation

I like to walk hedgerows and bridal paths nearby and watch them as spring develops. On Sunday (early April) I took a walk in the spring rain to find some spring greens for a soup. One of the best known … Continue reading →

Like this:

An old post from a previous blog worth sharing again as we’re at that time of year and it kicks off this new waste not want not category nicely!

Permaculture and pallets

I know a few people with a crazy pallet obsession 😀

They can be very useful. I decided to have a go myself.

I was quite keen to introduce more herbs and salad leaves that I use everyday around the kitchen door to ‘zone one’ as the ‘permies’ might say.

It turned out that a couple of spare pallets donated from a friend were perfect for this.

No need to purchase/buy/invest in a single thing. Little effort for a lot of reward.

“The purpose – where I start – is the idea of use. It is not recycling, it’s reuse.” -Issey Miyake

View from the doorway.

Salads and herbs close to hand.

How much might I be spending on bags of fresh salad leaves and fresh herbs to use everyday?

This has cost absolutely nothing

and I haven’t contributed to any destruction of the environment either through supporting the farming practices that would have been used to grow something I could have bought in a supermarket.

“We live in a disposable society. It’s easier to throw things out than to fix them. We even give it a name – we call it recycling.” -Neil Labute

No DIY skills needed either turn the pallet over stand it up and secure it with bricks in the bottom or anchor onto the wall.

Makes a useful storage or tidy space too

plant pots sit right in

“There is no away” Barry commoner.

These are his 4 laws of ecology.

Everything Is Connected To Everything Else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms and what affects one, affects all. Humans and other species are connected/dependent on other species. With this in mind it becomes hard to practise anything other than compassion and harmlessness.

Everything Must Go Somewhere.There is no “waste” in nature, and there is no “away” to which things can be thrown. Everything, such as wood smoke, nuclear waste, carbon emissions, etc., must go somewhere.

Nature Knows Best. Humankind has fashioned technology to improve upon nature, but such change in a natural system is “likely to be detrimental to that system.”

There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Exploitation of nature will inevitably involve the conversion of resources from useful to useless forms. In nature, both sides of the equation must balance, for every gain there is a cost, and all debts are eventually paid.

I have also reused containers from the kitchen that were saved waiting for a use

My two year old put this little empty pot in here after we’d finished some raspberries. Its *that* easy.

“The world generates about a billion tons of garbage a year. Those who live with it and from it are the poor – like the people of Cateura, Paraguay. And here they are transforming it into beauty. Landfill Harmonic follows the Orchestra as it takes its inspiring spectacle of trash-into-music around the world. Follow the lives of a garbage picker, a music teacher and a group of children from a Paraguayan slum that out of necessity started creating instruments entirely out of garbage. Landfill Harmonic is a beautiful story about the transformative power of music, which also highlights two vital issues of our times: poverty and waste pollution.”

Like this:

Just over 2 weeks ago we got our first hens, a lohman brown and a hybrid silkie. They had to stay in the run for a few days to get their bearings We decided to keep hens because we want … Continue reading →